source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 16:07:15 -0800 From: "John H. Chalmers" From: mclaren Subject: The adoration of the Cage-i (Round 2 of 15) --- A recent recording session involved overdubs of a cassette tape of harmonic series members 1-44 made 10 years ago by Jeff Stayton with megalyra solos recorded last week. After hearing the resulting composite, Bill Wesley offered some choice comments. "That sounds like an interesting use of chance. As opposed to John Cage's *stupid* use of chance." "You mean the idea of flipping coins to choose notes? What's stupid about that, Bill?" "You get a bunch of random pitches. White noise. But the human ear is specifically adapted to detect and filter out noise--because if you can't hear a sabre-tooth tiger's roar through the noise of the jungle, you're dead. So what did John Cage elevate to highest status in his brain-dead musical theories? Just what the human ear is best designed to throw out...noise. Another word for chance." "But wait a minute, Bill. Cage worshippers like to point out that he didn't just pick notes at random--Cage *constrained* the choice of notes and phrases. In 'Music of Changes,' for instance, he used coin flips to choose among constrained start-times and transpositions of a set of pre-composed phrases." "It doesn't matter, Brian. If you throw the aces out of a card deck, that doesn't make the distribution of cards any less random after you shuffle 'em." "That's a good analogy. I wonder why none of these people seem to understand that?" "Because the cult of personality tends to impair judgment. In the end, no matter how you constrain it, noise is noise. Even if you narrow down the choice to two notes, it's still random. And you'll detect and be bored by that randomness." "I've noticed that, Bill." "It's why, even if you alternate between only two phrase start-times, your ear will hear the random distribution and find it trivial." "You make a good point there, Bill. I have to admit it certainly is easy to pick a conversation out of the noise of a crowded room. And it certainly explains why 'Music of Changes' sounds like complete crap." "Exactly. Noise is noise, no matter how you constrain it. The notion that there's anything interesting about a random distribution is a stupid idea--pure and simple. It's dumb. But then, that's the whole point." "Eh?" "It's what always happens in a group of monkeys. Whenever some lesser monkey shows imagination or initiative, the alpha males always crush him. They've got to--to maintain the status quo." "I don't understand, Bill." "The whole idea behind Cage's music is that he wasn't part of a revolution at all. He was part of a *suppression* on the part of the aristocracy. The rich people want to play golf all day and swig martinis. They don't want *anyone* to rock the boat. You start adding extra pitches to the octave, and who knows what's next? Everything could come unglued. So the artistocracy hire someone like Cage to crush people with *real* imagination and drive them out of music." "People with imagination? You mean...like, microtonalists?" "Yep." "Well... Cage *did* call microtonality 'just another wing on the academy...'" "Sure. The whole point of Cage's music was to take anyone with enthusiasm and originality and horrify him to the point where he gets out of the field and goes to work at McDonald's." "Isn't that kind of harsh, Bill? After all, people like Warren Burt are already accusing me of 'showing bad manners freely, and displaying an appalling lack of gentleness and generosity' to people like Cage. God only knows what they'd say if I repeated *your* comments on the tuning forum." "Of course they accused you of showing 'bad manners.' Creativity is considered the *ultimate* in bad manners by the aristocracy. It's another way of maintaining the status quo." "How's that, Bill?" "You call imagination 'rude' and then hire people like Cage to make sure that only cynical, empty people have any power in the field of music. All that talk about 'removing intention from the music' and 'letting the music be itself' was nothing but another way of making music students into a bunch of monks who flagellate themselves on command." "Flipping coins never did seem like much of a musical revolution, I must admit... But, gosh, Bill--this is pretty blunt talk, isn't it?" "That's a laugh! These people bleat about 'gentleness and generosity'--and the minute you suggest emperor Cage has no clothes, they come after you with a bowie knife and murder in their eye. So much for 'gentleness.' So much for 'generosity.'" "It *is* strange... You'd think the microtonalists would stick together, despite their minor differences." "Well, remember what Harry Partch said in his program notes to 'Water, Water': 'The creative man is not specialized by inclination, but by the autocracy of modern education. (..) Ordinarily, however, he is so closely intimidated by his specialty that if he decides to make some slight deviation from the norm, in some creative work, it will seem like a 'revolution,' both to him and to others, and he can easily become the progenitor of a 'new' movement. But the deviation must be slight, because a large deviation is not only incredible, it isn't even recognizable. In the end, it is just ridiculous.'" "You mean a deviation like throwing out octave equivalence, Bill? Or pointing out that the psychoacoustic evidence doesn't support just intonation?" "Exactamundo." "Gee...when you put it that way, Bill, it *does* sound as though Cage was just another toady." "Right. Another errand boy elevated by the musical aristocracy into a position of godhood to keep the *really* creative people from rocking the boat." "Creative people? Like Partch? Or Carrillo?" "You got it." "But if I ever dared to post something like *that* on the tuning forum...ye gods. They'd go ballistic, Bill." "Maybe. But from what you've said, most of the academics on that tuning forum are too lazy even to write a letter. So I don't think *I* have anything to worry about." "Come to think of it, Bill, you're probably right." --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 22 Jan 1996 07:38 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id WAA10477; Sun, 21 Jan 1996 22:38:53 -0800 Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 22:38:53 -0800 Message-Id: <9601212325167216@csst.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu